


I Just Want Someone To Die For

by Lyssa_Alara



Series: 50 Months of Ship Prompts [2]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Depression, Gender-Neutral Hange Zoë, Hange Zoë & Levi Are Best Friends, Hange Zoë Being Hange Zoë, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kenny Ackerman Being an Asshole, Levi Has Feelings (Shingeki no Kyojin), Levi Has Issues (Shingeki no Kyojin), Levi Has OCD (Shingeki no Kyojin), Levi Has PTSD (Shingeki no Kyojin), Levi Has Trust Issues (Shingeki no Kyojin), Levi-centric (Shingeki no Kyojin), Nonbinary Hange Zoë, Other, Past Domestic Violence, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, Scientist Hange Zoë, Suicidal Thoughts, Trigger Warnings, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:14:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29307861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyssa_Alara/pseuds/Lyssa_Alara
Summary: Levi isn't doing too well. Hanji is there to help.(Content Warning, read the tags. Multiple references to poor mental health and dark thoughts. Proceed with caution.)
Relationships: Levi & Hange Zoë, Levi Ackerman & Furlan Church, Levi Ackerman & Furlan Church & Isabel Magnolia, Levi Ackerman & Isabel Magnolia, Levi/Hange Zoë
Series: 50 Months of Ship Prompts [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2033524
Comments: 1
Kudos: 66





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning, please read the tags. Let me know if there's something that needs to be added. Please, watch your mental health and don't read if this could be triggering for you. This is based off some of my own thoughts and experiences (minus the past sexual assault, don't worry y'all).
> 
> There will be a second update some time this month seeing as I missed January.

Everyone had their ways of coping in the Survey Corps. For those who didn’t… well, they didn’t usually make it past their first few expeditions. Levi knew that all too well.

(It was something that wasn’t so well-known about the Survey Corps. The suicide rates were just as high as the death rates outside of the walls. Levi would know, because someone had to clean the bodies off the pavement or cut them down from the ceiling).

_“I’m sorry for your loss”_ became _“You need to do better”_ and Levi hated how everyone ignored the pain of the Survey Corps, as if they were the only ones who were mourning the thousands of soldiers who were killed every time they stepped foot outside the walls that sheltered them from the man-eating giants.

For Hanji, it was burying themselves in an excessive amount of work, always adding more and more to their workload with the hope that they will never be free to think about all the trauma they’ve collected.

He knew exactly when they were struggling with the pain, and he could see it anytime they suddenly had too many experiments planned to come to breakfast. Or dinner. It was something he had learned to pick up on, something he had learned to work around in order to make sure they took care of themselves.

Sometimes he wondered if their aim was to work themselves into an early grave.

Sometimes he wondered if the mind-numbing work they were always immersed in was their way of stopping their mind from screaming at them, distracting themselves from the pain that writhed in their heart. Maybe he could try it sometime.

He had always known that Hanji was a little strange. It wasn’t something that bothered him; hell, he was just as strange as they were. But he couldn’t help but think about how they thought of everything they had been through.

Did they struggle to suppress the memories, just as he did? Or did they find it easy to turn off the voice and continue on with their life? Was he just weak like his uncle had told him he was? He remembered the man telling him to never grow attached to anyone, lest he want to be hurt in a way no amount of rebellion could overcome. But he did it anyway and look where it landed him.

He knew traumatic experiences were different for everyone, but surely there was only so much someone could take before they broke down and never got up again. Levi would be lying to himself if he didn’t say that he hadn’t come close to giving up.

The thought was tempting. Just… let the titan grab him when he was out on an expedition beyond the walls. Make a wrong move and slam into the tree at a speed that would shatter nearly every bone in his body. Leap in front of a swinging blade and pretend that there was nothing he could do to stop it in time.

He could think of a thousand and one different ways to make his death look like an accident, but he never acted on them.

He would never leave his friends behind, where anything could happen to them and he wouldn’t be there to save them. He had learned the hard way that the one time he wasn’t there could mean that he would never see them again.

For Erwin, his way of distracting himself was strategizing. For every soldier who died beyond the walls, Erwin took their death and made it into motivation for himself to keep making his plans _bigger_ and _better (always bigger, always better)_. Always pushing himself to remember the sacrifices, but never the faces. Part of Levi wished he could just forget their faces as easily as Erwin did, but the terrifying thought of forgetting their faces kept him from thinking about it too hard. The pain was his burden to bear and bear it he would.

(But he wished he could forget their looks of adoration turned terror, the looks they gave him when they were on the brink of death, pleading for him to _save them_ because _they didn’t want to die, not yet, not like this–_ ).

He knew that Erwin’s way of coping with the especially brutal role of commander was more than unhealthy, but then again, everything about the Survey Corps was unhealthy, so it didn’t make too much of a difference. Still, it was worrying to see Erwin obsessively working himself into an early grave whenever they came home from a particularly rough expedition.

For Mike, it was training. He had always been much like Levi, in that regard – training for hours on end, working until his limbs were aching, and his heart was pounding, and his head was stuffed with cotton. Because how could you focus on the death when you were too tired to think straight?

Maybe the fear of his own dreams – nightmares, they were, about ghosts and people long since dead – were why Levi never slept, or maybe it was something else entirely. Levi couldn’t find it in himself to care enough to investigate it further in hopes of finding an answer. Or maybe he was scared of finding an answer.

Some days, training made him feel better – like he wasn’t completely worthless and useless, like he was more than just scum who didn’t deserve to have everything he owned, and he was allowed to be as happy as he could in the world he lived in.

Some days, he went into the training room and didn’t come out until hours later, with busted knuckles and blood dripped steadily down his fingers and falling to the floor (usually, he would obsessively clean the floor where the droplets landed but on those days, he couldn’t bring himself to care, not when the buzzing in his ears was louder than anything Hanji could scream, and his sight was blurry and unfocussed no matter how hard he tried to snap out of it, and he could feel the hairs on his arm rise, but why because he didn’t feel cold (he didn’t feel anything).

(If blood stained his white shirt, then no one would question it if he made sure he brushed his bleeding hand against the spot. No one would have to know).

For Nanaba, it was drinking. She always went by herself to a hole-in-the-wall bar just down the road from the main Survey Corps headquarters after an expedition. She didn’t usually come back until sunrise, when the only one awake was Levi and the random few too traumatised to sleep.

Sometimes, Levi worried that she would go to the bar and never come back.

Maybe that was what Hanji had been talking about, when they had said that they were always scared for him whenever he disappeared for the day. It was only ever on his really bad days, where he felt too numb and exhausted to even talk, but he usually managed to drag himself out to some quiet space deep in the 3DMG training woods before he collapsed and stared at the same spot until long after the sun had set.

The first time he had done it, he had felt only slightly better (or slightly less exhausted of constantly pasting on the usual angry mask that was quite the juxtaposition from the numbness that buzzed in his head), but Hanji had jumped on him the moment he dragged himself back to his quarters at dawn.

They looked like they were about to murder him, until they saw the emptiness in his expression and the bags under his eyes that seemed as if he hadn’t slept in years, and they had closed their mouth and told him to get some sleep.

Levi hated that he had worried them with his disappearance, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care too much in the moment. He was exhausted in more ways than one, and it seemed that the more he fought back against the feeling of despair and hopelessness that always seemed to be drowning him, the tireder he got.

(He ignored how his mind made connections between the feeling that always overcame him and swimming in a deep lake, screaming for help but no one hearing, leaving him to drown alone and scared in the dark water.

Levi couldn’t swim).


	2. Chapter 2

There’s bitter satisfaction in watching yourself burn – something Levi knew all too well. He wondered sometimes if his friends would know what he was talking about if he told them about the things that were always circling around his head. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t. It was hard to tell when they hid it so well.

That was assuming that he would be able to suddenly acquire the eloquence that would be required to explain what exactly was circling around his head. He had trouble explaining it to himself, late at night, when he pretended that for a moment that ~~someone cared enough to notice~~ he was strong enough to tell someone.

The nights where it was particularly bad, and he had nowhere else to go but retreat into his head where the thoughts were circling like vultures circled helpless prey. How fitting, considering he faced gigantic man-eating titans every time he left the (relative) safety of the walls, but he was afraid of his own thoughts and nightmares. Oh, how the mighty fall, as the saying went.

He wondered how he had managed to even pass the mandatory psych evaluations once every 6 months, and what would happen if he reached out to a doctor about how he was feeling, but the thought was dismissed almost as soon as it came.

One of two things would happen if he did.

One, he would be dismissed because he was Humanity’s Strongest Soldier and so what if he had nightmares? Every soldier in the Corps had nightmares about the monsters that they were tasked with destroying and compared to some, he was lucky because he was almost guaranteed to make it home (or as much as someone who did what he did could be guaranteed to not die out, alone, in the fields where titans and predators would feast on his body until he was nothing more than a pile of bones).

Plus, he didn’t need people knowing that he was struggling. Erwin had told him so many times that he needed to be string because so many people, and not just soldiers, looked up to him and relied on him being strong to give them hope. It grew tiring after a while, all the pretending. Levi tried to remember a time where he wasn’t pretending, but he always came up blank.

(So what if his nightmares weren’t always about the monsters beyond the wall, but of men covered in dirt, locked in a place far from the light, trapped underground with only filthy air to breathe. So what if the men in his nightmares knew his body just a little too well, or if the way their hands roamed made him want to peel his skin off or maybe even _melt it off_ –).

He was fine.

Or two, he would be deemed unfit to work as a soldier and released from the Survey Corps, left to do nothing except sit in silence (a reminder that he had nobody that knew him outside of the Corps, having either died or abandoned him) and slowly sink under the weight of his own hopelessness and guilt.

He couldn’t risk either of those things happening, in addition to the fact that he would most likely be required to talk about things that have long since happened, but still haunted his dreams (just like the hands leaving trails of bruises on his chest, _help me please_ ) to some random stranger who thought they knew what was best for him and that was a big no-no.

Sometimes, Levi wished he had been born above ground. It wasn’t fair that he had to suffer his entire life while kids ran around and got dirty and angry over being forced to have a bath, while he sat in his own filth in the underground, wishing that he had fresh air, fresh food, and fresh water (he didn’t even know fresh water existed until he learned about water treatment).

Hypocritical, but Levi had never much been one to linger too much on fair and unfair. Life had never been fair, something Levi knew all too well.

Staring into the mirror in his quarters, Levi took in the black bags under his eyes, the way his skin looked as if it had been completely drained of blood, and the way his frame trembled ever so slightly, and wondered if his friends ever had the thoughts.

_They would be better off without you_

Levi knew they would be. Gods did he know they would be, but that didn’t stop the small, selfish part of him clinging to them, wanting to live just for them. If all else failed, at least Levi had Erwin, Hanji, Mike and Nanaba to keep him company.

Even as he watched members come and go, year after year, all meeting the same gruesome fate that he was certain he would one day meet (he wasn’t eager to die at a titan’s hand, but the peace that death offered was so appealing, and the desire grew every day), Levi knew that as long as there was someone to protect, he could keep going, even if he didn’t want to.

_You don’t deserve to live while they are dead_

It was hard for Levi to heal from those wounds. The wounds borne from pigtails and witty words and clever comebacks, carefree smiles, and promises of a future together. Some future it was.

Every year, Levi would visit their graves. Two small matching grey headstones, reading nothing more than a name, the date of their death and _will be missed._ Of-fucking-course they would be missed. There wasn’t a day that went by where Levi didn’t miss his family not of blood, but of choice. They had been everything to him, and now they were nothing more than a memory of love and a will to live for something more than to serve.

A will to live because he _wanted to_.

But that’s all he ever seemed to do these days; serve.

Levi would stare at their graves, every year without fail, and wonder what would’ve happened if they could see him now. See the way that he would live and promise himself that the next time the random drunk that picked a fight with him threw a punch, he would dodge it instead of letting it hit him.

He would dodge it instead of letting it hit him, and feeling the pain radiate around his ribs. He would dodge it instead of smiling to himself as the pain became louder than the voices whispering devilish things in his ears, as it pushed him to the surface of the ocean of quiet that was drowning him.

Every year he promised, and still came back to their graves knowing he had broken his promise just like he did the first time. Could he even do anything right?

Every expedition was the same, at some point in Levi’s mind, and he allowed himself to drift off into a sea of numbness. The days bled together, not that Levi cared too much. All the better for him, if he didn’t remember if the last expedition had been last week or last month, if he didn’t remember what he ate for dinner the last night (what he ate at all, in the past week). It made it easier to ignore the ache beneath his ribs, burning his chest and making goosebumps rise on his skin.

It made it easier to ignore the whispers in the back of his head, begging him for pain because it _hurts but it feels so good_.

Levi scared himself, sometimes, with the direction his thoughts took. But most of the time, he couldn’t quite bring himself to disagree with the voice in his head. It was right, after all. It _did_ feel so good. To bleed, to hurt, to make himself hurt on the outside like he hurt on the inside.

No matter how much he hurt himself though, it never seemed to match the constant ache in his heart, for the people he had loved. For the people he had lost.


	3. Chapter 3

Some days, Levi wished he could claw off his skin. 

It wasn’t something that could be helped, not really. He supposed that his obsession with cleanliness had something to do with how he always felt so disgusting and so dirty, like he was still living in the Underground, breathing the heavy air, and drinking the contaminated water because he had no other choice if he wanted to survive.

It felt phantom hands roved hungrily across his body, violating him in the most humiliating way he could imagine. No matter how much he scrubbed at his skin, he couldn’t get rid of the feeling of contaminated hands on him.

Skin bleeding and peeling, he would scrub at his body with the cloth obsessively (violently) and relish the pain it brought, the pain that drowned out the way his skin crawled and burned away the ghost hands roaming his body.

For a few precious minutes, he could forget about the way the faces flashed behind closed eyelids and in haunting dreams, and the way that the room danced circles around his dizzy brain, drunk on the feeling of being free.

How ironic that it took pain to be free from more pain, regardless of how different this pain was to the pain embedded in his past. Regardless of how this pain was his choice, and how the pain haunting his dreams was not anything that he wanted. He didn’t want it, but his pleas were ignored, and Levi would never be able to forgive himself for it.

He had always raged whenever someone called him a wild animal, to his face or behind his back. ‘The Commander’s rabid dog’ had to be one of the most common ones he had heard, and Levi couldn’t honestly say he couldn’t see it.

He was wild and untamed, having lived nearly his entire life locked in an Underground cage where he was left to sharpen his claws and fangs without suppression. Probably the one good thing that had come from being trapped Underground, he could admit, was the freedom from authority. He had been allowed to develop to survive without being shamed for it, and he had done just that.

(Anyone could be violated in the Underground, Levi knew, regardless of if they were man or woman or anything in between, but he ignored it. The Underground was vastly different to above ground, and that included the way gender played into treatment. In the underground, you were treated the same if you were a woman to if you were a man. Above ground, it was a very different story.

He ignored how the way the lack of discrimination in the Underground made him feel the slightest bit better about what happened to him).

He remembered telling Hanji about it once, wishing for _someone_ to know, to help him because Levi was drowning in it all the time, but the feeling of regret and anxiety that consumed him afterwards prevented Levi from ever telling anyone else. He knew he shouldn’t have told anyone, but Levi was weak and stupid, and he had allowed himself to be vulnerable again.

Part of him was glad he had told someone, glad the burden of his knowledge and past wasn’t resting on his shoulders alone. Especially when he felt himself spiralling, when he felt logic go out the window and his past take over his mind, reminding him of everything he desperately wanted to forget.

Surprisingly, Hanji was really good at keeping him grounding during those dark days. Something told Levi they were aware just how bad it was, and by extension, knew how to counteract whatever thoughts were circling his head. Even if he didn’t believe any of the words they said, the reassurance was nice to hear – maybe having someone who cared about him wasn’t so bad?

When Hanji found him in his bathtub, skin scraped raw and staring distantly into space, Levi felt their warm hands rubbing his back gently, their soothing words washing over him and silencing the thoughts that threatened to suffocate him (send him tumbling over the edge he was constantly dancing on, wondering when he would finally fall, fall, _fall_.

His eyes slid closed and for the first time, Levi felt someone reach out a hand and pull him out of the churning water he was drowning in. 

Maybe this wasn’t so bad after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
